It’s rare that you’ll see someone walk the aisle at CrossPoint Church, Trussville. And when you do, it’s a spontaneous anomaly — it’s not because he or she was asked to.
But Senior Pastor Ryan Whitley says there’s always an invitation.
“I’m in the middle of an invitation right now,” Whitley said on a recent Wednesday morning sitting in his office sorting through a stack of cards.
The cards are written responses from Easter services. Eighty-five people noted on their “connection cards” that day that they had no relationship with Christ or weren’t sure if they had one.
None of them walked the aisle.
But in the days following, Whitley and other CrossPoint staff members have followed up with each of those 85 people. Not all have been interested in talking, but many have welcomed staff members into their homes or agreed to meet them for coffee and talk about the gospel.
“There were 2,009 people who came to our church on Easter Sunday, and for our church, this (making personal contacts) is a far better way to offer a personal invitation to Christ,” Whitley said.
He’s not knocking the traditional public altar call, but he said in his church with multiple services each Sunday, the two and a half minutes at the end of a service just wouldn’t do much to ensure people were adequately followed up with and discipled.
The card idea is nothing new, Whitley said, but it’s worked well for his church.
Instead of walking the aisle for membership, newcomers attend a new members class, during which church staff shares the gospel with them personally.
“We are available at any time to talk with someone about their relationship with the Lord. To us, that serves as an ongoing invitation,” Whitley said.
But his church isn’t the first not to have a public invitation. In fact, it’s only been a fairly recent development in Christian history that churches do have altar calls, according to Christianity Today writers Douglas A. Sweeney and Mark C. Rogers.
“Successful evangelists such as George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley never gave an altar call. In fact, they did not even know what it was. They invited their hearers passionately to come to Christ by faith and regularly counseled anxious sinners after their services. But they did not call sinners to make a public, physical response after evangelistic appeals,” Sweeney and Rogers wrote.
A few ministers began to use altar calls in the 1700s, but they didn’t really catch on until the Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s, according to Christianity Today.
Harold Fanning, interim pastor of Mays Memorial Baptist Church, Toney, said he thinks its popularity spread because of its use in Billy Graham crusades.
“Dr. Graham used to always conclude his message with an invitation by saying, ‘Every person Jesus called to follow Him, He called them publicly,’” Fanning said.
The traditional altar call still takes place at Mays Memorial Baptist, but Fanning said much of the reason it works there is because of what happens right after it’s over.
“I intentionally am one of the last to leave (after the service), and you would be surprised the number of people I have privately led to Christ following a service,” he said.
“Without exception, they tell me they are intimidated walking down the aisle in front of a crowd.”
While Fanning said Graham is correct, he feels a person’s baptism is his or her public statement of a new life.
Whether there’s an altar call or not, Fanning said the most important thing is to “make sure that people understand that the invitation to Christ is not closed simply because we do a benediction. I make sure the congregation understands that I will be available after church if they need to talk.”
But at Trinity Baptist Church, Roanoke, where Pastor Richard Richie served for 10 years until recently becoming pastor of Flint Baptist Church, Decatur, nothing works like an old-fashioned altar call, he said.
“Though I have tried having people fill out a card or bulletin insert … I have not been too successful in these approaches for leading souls to the Lord,” Richie said. “[The Trinity] congregation is a more traditional church and has not embraced these methods.”
And he said he’s seen God really work through the music and message to draw people to the Lord and propel them toward the altar when they feel the Spirit moving in their heart.
“It’s like they can’t get there fast enough,” Richie said.
“I still believe there is something special about encouraging people to stand up and step forward to make a public profession of faith for Jesus.”
But Richie also said much like Whitley and Fanning, he’s seen more professions of faith outside of the worship hour than inside it so that most of the time, the responses to the altar call are folks he or others have talked with previously.
“I think what is key is spending time to get to know the individual in a comfortable, nonthreatening environment outside the church where one can take their time in developing and nurturing that relationship and eventually earning the right to share Jesus with that person,” Richie said.
“After helping lead a person to the Lord, then I always encourage them to follow this up with a public proclamation by coming up at the end of the service to request baptism and membership,” Richie said.
“It makes things much easier and helps later in the assimilation process to ensure that the new convert is properly followed up on and plugged into the life of the church.”
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